Music History - Rennaisance & Early Baroque Periods

Homophony

Music in a harmonic, chordal texture.

Polyphony

Musical style with multiple different parts, each forming an individual melody and harmonizing together.

Paraphrase

The process of embelishing chants with extra notes, set them in graceful motions, and smoothed out passages.

Josquin Desperez

(1450-1521) The first master of High Rennaisance style - was famous for his Mass and Modet, wrote Ave Maria

Pange Lingua Mass

Desperez's most famous piece and a basis for much of the mass of its time.

Giovanni Pierluige de Palestrina

(1525-1594) Singer or choirmaster of many of Rome's churches, including the sistine chapel. Famous for his vast catologue of Masses.

Pope Marcellus Mass

Composed by Palestrina to prevent polyphony from being banned and proved that more complex church music had a place.

Roland de Lassus

(1532-1594) Famous Dutch travelling composer, ended up in the court of Munich writing his masses.

Tomas Luis de Victoria

(1548-1611) A spanish priest who spent many years composing masses for the Jesuits in Madrid.

William Byrd

(1540-1623) An organist Queen Elizebeth I's Chapel Royal and also an Illegal English Catholic. He wrote masses for the persecuted Catholic community in England.

Modet

Relatively short composition of Latin words, made up of short sections of Homophony and imitative Polyphony

Madrigal

a short composition set to a stanza poem - typically a love poem - a secular take on the modet, this set the ground work for later musical works.

Basso Continuo

Baroque accompaniment made up of a bass part usually played by two instruments: a keyboard plus a low melodic instrument.

Baroque

The term used to define the time period from 1600 to 1750

Ostinato

a continually repeated musical phrase or rhythm

Recicative

The tecnique of declaiming words musically in a heightened thetrical manner, essentialy the dialogue of Opera

Aria

An extendid piece for a solo singer that has much more musical elaboration and cadence than recictive

Claudio Monteverdi

(1567-1643) the most important composer of the 17th century, composed Orfeo (1607), the oldest opera still in performance

Orfeo

Written by Monteverdi - considered the first great opera, and the oldest opera still in performance

Henry Purcell

"the greatest English composer of the Baroque era", wrote several "welcome songs" for the kings court. Combined older English traditions with the newer musical styles of his time.

Dido and Aeneas

English opera composed by Henry Purcell - based on the Aeneid

Girolamo Frescobaldi

(1583-1643) A famous Italian keyboardist at St. Peters. His works were very influential for composers to come, specifically Bach

Toccates

Free formed pieces meant to capture the spirit of Frescobaldi's improvosation

Canzonas

more rigorously organized works emphasizing imitative texture